Nearly two decades ago, Randy and Janna Sorensen approached Mr. Romney, then a church official, for help: unable to have a baby on their own, they wanted to adopt but could not do so through the church, which did not facilitate adoptions for mothers who worked outside the home.

Devastated, they told Mr. Romney that the rule was unjust and that they needed two incomes to live in Boston. Mr. Romney helped, but not by challenging church authorities. He took a calculator to the Sorensen household budget and showed how with a few sacrifices, Ms. Sorensen could quit her job. Their children are now grown, and Mr. Sorensen said they were so grateful that they had considered naming a child Mitt. (The church has since relaxed its prohibition on adoption for women who work outside the home.)

What’s telling about this is that Romney was not going to violate church orthodoxy, not even out of compassion, but he worked to find a way within his church’s teachings to help this couple, with whom he plainly sympathized, achieve their goal. I find that a commendable frame of mind.

I find in most respects, Romney’s fidelity to the LDS Church is the most attractive thing about him. I say that as someone who, theologically speaking, doesn’t believe the LDS faith is strictly Christian. But I generally find Mormons, in practice, to be good people who live upright lives based in sincere practice of their faith. I liked this from the story, about how seriously Romney takes prayer:

“I remember literally kneeling down with Mitt at his home and praying about our firm,” Bob Gay, a former Bain colleague and current church official, told Jeff Benedict, author of “The Mormon Way of Doing Business.” “We did that in times of crisis, and we prayed that we’d do right by our people and our investors.”

Mr. Romney also prays before taking action on decisions he has already made, asking for divine reassurance, a feeling that he is “united with the powers above,” Dr. Hassell said. Sometimes Mr. Romney would report that even though he had made a decision on the merits, prayer had changed his mind. “Even though rationally this looks like the thing to do, I just have a feeling we shouldn’t do it,” he would say, according to Grant Bennett, another friend and church leader.

The one aspect of his Mormonism that concerns me is what you might call theologized nationalism. From the NYT:

Or take Mr. Romney’s frequent tributes to American exceptionalism. “I refuse to believe that America is just another place on the map with a flag,” he said in announcing his bid for the presidency last June. Every presidential candidate highlights patriotism, but Mr. Romney’s is backed by the Mormon belief that the United States was chosen by God to play a special role in history, its Constitution divinely inspired.

“He is an unabashed, unapologetic believer that America is the Promised Land,” said Douglas D. Anderson, dean of the business school at Utah State University and a friend, and that leading it is “an obligation and responsibility to God.”

It is one thing to believe that one’s nation has a responsibility to God; all nations do, as a collective representation of the individual souls within the nation. But I don’t believe America is the Promised Land, and I think it’s heresy and hubris to profess that. I think we can get into all kinds of serious foreign policy trouble from American exceptionalism. But this has to be admitted: there is nothing about American exceptionalism that is limited to Mormon believers. Most Republicans, and many Democrats, would agree with Romney on this, and consider their belief nothing more than ordinary patriotism. This is garden-variety American conservatism, exactly what you would get from any GOP presidential candidate who is not Ron Paul — and indeed, some version of it is what you would get from any presidential candidate, including the Democrats. American exceptionalism is so deep in the American psyche that no politician hoping to be president can challenge it. As the foreign policy realist Stephen Walt has written, it’s deceptive and harmful to America’s interests:

The only thing wrong with this self-congratulatory portrait of America’s global role is that it is mostly a myth. Although the United States possesses certain unique qualities — from high levels of religiosity to a political culture that privileges individual freedom — the conduct of U.S. foreign policy has been determined primarily by its relative power and by the inherently competitive nature of international politics. By focusing on their supposedly exceptional qualities, Americans blind themselves to the ways that they are a lot like everyone else.

This unchallenged faith in American exceptionalism makes it harder for Americans to understand why others are less enthusiastic about U.S. dominance, often alarmed by U.S. policies, and frequently irritated by what they see as U.S. hypocrisy, whether the subject is possession of nuclear weapons, conformity with international law, or America’s tendency to condemn the conduct of others while ignoring its own failings. Ironically, U.S. foreign policy would probably be more effective if Americans were less convinced of their own unique virtues and less eager to proclaim them.

I point this out to acknowledge that as nervous as Romney’s Mormonish devotion to American exceptionalism makes me, it seems entirely of a piece with mainstream American political thinking. All things considered, though, I find Romney’s true-believing Mormonism, fairly considered, to be more of a reason for cultural and social conservatives to vote for him than not. I may be critical of Mormon doctrines, but Romney clearly and demonstrably takes his faith quite seriously, and in most cases, I think, this will lead him to act in ways that orthodox Christians and other cultural conservatives will approve of. And personally, I would hope that the historical Mormon experience of persecution would make a President Romney acutely sensitive to religious liberty concerns, and act accordingly when appointing judges and choosing Supreme Court nominees.

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38 Responses to God And Mitt Romney

“The one aspect of his Mormonism that concerns me is what you might call theologized nationalism.”

Yet such nationalism is inevitable because it’s an essential part of understanding their faith. Mormonism is really the first major religion of the American Experience. It’s not a European or some other religious export from another country. Believing America is the true promised land and that Christ really did walk through the heartland was part of Mormonism’s appeal, a new religion for the young nation which transcended the doctrinal differences between Catholics and Protestants, High and Low Anglicans, Presbyterians and Methodists, Congregationalists and Baptists and so on and so forth, all brought to this country from the Pilgrims to the Puritans to indentured servants and so forth. It’s no wonder in this context it become popular enough to survive for so long and then ultimately establish itself.

“And personally, I would hope that the historical Mormon experience of persecution would make a President Romney acutely sensitive to religious liberty concerns, and act accordingly when appointing judges and choosing Supreme Court nominees.”
Isn’t your hope in a President Romney’s judicial philosophy much more based in your hopes for his political conservatism, rather than his affiliation with a persecuted group?

After all, the sentence could easily be rewritten: “And personally, I would hope that the historical black experience of persecution would make a President Obama acutely sensitive to liberty concerns, and act accordingly when appointing judges and choosing Supreme Court nominees.”

Swap Mormon/black and Romney/Obama, and drop the qualifier “religious” from liberty, and I think you could see this thought equally vital for an Obama supporter. After all, why subdivide “liberty” in order to include a “religious” category, as a general practice?

The Biblical injunctions against homosexuality are absolutely, entirely and totally fundamental to Christianity and anything that does not accept and enforce those injunctions is a threat to religious liberty

All the other Christian doctrines transgressed and violated by Mormonism are just crap that can be ignored whenever it’s convenient.

His belief in American Exceptionalism, his belief in America, is something that certainly cannot hurt in an election. And I still remember during the primaries when sitting at in the local restaurant hearing the man at the next table say, “At least Mormons are Americans!”

I’m not concerned about Romney’s specific Mormon religious beliefs impacting his policies, as he displays the ability to compartmentalize. When he was governor he wasn’t the first Mormon governor, he was just our governor.

I am more concerned about his advisors. The last thing I want to see are a bunch of neocon hacks convincing him to launch more preemptive wars for peace.

I’m not sure what you’re saying makes any sense. “Anything that does not accept or enforce those injunctions is a threat to religious liberty”? Who has ever said that? I’m not even sure how to understand that. I think you’ve misread something somewhere. The religious liberty argument has always been about forcing religious people to disobey their own faith; certainly that’s the only way it’s been discussed here.

For the French (a tiny minority of the population) who go to church, the coffee at the local cafe across the street from the church prior to the service and the Aperitif in the same said cafe after the service provide just about the right amount of time for the duck to roast properly…

Well, the difference is that they aren’t going to enforce their theology when it comes to the divinity of Christ, and in terms of public morals there’s more agreement than disagreement. But yeah, there’s way too much “paper over the gaping differences between Mormonism and Christianity because Mormons are nice or politically prudent” going on.

It sounds like he would make a great Mormon church official. He’d also make a nice neighbor, if the distance between his outer perimeter fence and the neighboring property allows for casual conversation. A president of the United States? He has no qualifications for that post.

I wonder if members of minority religions may actually be less sympathetic to the current war chants about religious liberty. Mormons have spent the last century trying to assimilate and focus on their American-ness. That’s in contrast to the current handwringing over religious liberty, which is voiced in a “seperateness” that may make Mormons uncomfortable.

It is also religious minorities who have the most to lose in the creation of special rights being pushed by the religious majority. They may, in the long run, be more likely to be the victims of “conscience” clauses and the complete removal of the Christian non-church world from the touches of public policy. Mormons don’t have hospitals that will be completely exempt from public policy and only a handfull of colleges where janitors are being treated as “ministers” in order to exempt the colleges from public policy.

There are two Mormon beliefs with public policy implications that concern me the most when considering a Mormon candidate for office (not just Romney):

1) The LDS’ especially strident Zionism (at least as bad as, and likely worse than, the Hagee-type Pentecostals). Silly Glenn Beck is perhaps the most prominent advocate of this idolatry, but it appears that Romney buys into this worship-Israel garbage as well. Militant Zionism is one of the few issues on which Romney has shown consistency, alas.

2) The whole business about the Indians being descended from the ancient Israelites, which somehow flows into the LDS leadership (if not necessarily all the masses) supporting massive mestizo immigration into the US and amnesty for the illegals already here. On the one hand, the GOP’s Senate candidate in Arizona, Flake, is one of these open-borders Mormons, along with Hatch, Reid, Labrador, and others; but, OTOH, Pearce, the sponsor of Arizona’s 1070 law, is a Mormon, as are restrictionists Chaffetz, Heller, Crapo, and others. I would want to know if a Mormon candidate believed that his god demanded unrestricted entry for his “lost tribes” into the American “promised land.”

I don’t think we have enough information to draw that conclusion. To determine the world wide average level of religiosity would require a weighted average of the Pew data by national population. I don’t think that has been done and I could see China dragging the average way down.

Also sociologists tend to compare like to like. For example India has a fairly high level of religiosity, but of a different sort from what you would see in the US. So one is an apple and the other’s an orange.

I do not have any problems with Romney’s religion – I just don’t see how he will be more sensitive to issues around religious freedom. It is the courts which will ultimately protect such freedom – not the president. So even if he is sympathetic – it is irrelevant. Frankly – given his utter lack of anything remotely approaching the vaguest understanding of foreign policy and the state of the world combined with his belief in American exceptionalism – I find him to be a dangerous candidate. It is like – Obama’s foreign policy is Bush 41 Romney would be Bush 43 on steroids. And plain old Bush was bad enough. His op-ed on the START treaty displayed total ignorance about the treaty and nuclear disarnament in general, he has promised to consult his friend Bibi Netanyahu on all matters middle east thus sacrificing the sovereignty not to mention national interests of the US, he wants to double the defense budget (why? who we gonna attack?), he thinks Russia is our biggest enemy, he thinks we have to confront China and maintain dominance in Asia (the Asians may have something to say about our “dominance”), his remarks about the missle shield in Europe demonstrate he not only is clueless about the technology but doesn’t know what our allies want, oh yeah – his advisors are unrepentant Bush “let’s invade Iraq” neocons. He has recommended bombing Iran (I suspect he’d backtrack on that if elected – a chat with the Chiefs of Staff would probably chill him out on that one).

If he even remotely gets to implement the sort of things he says re: our relationship with the rest of the world – religious freedom will be the least of our worries.

The guy doesn’t have an ideology. His entire campaign boils down to “I really admire the thought of ME being president — what do I have to tell you to get your vote? That’s why Republicans who have some principles –however odious, in my seldom humble opinion — longed for anyone but Mitt. My mother is the Republican in the family — her grandfather was a Republican and an organizer for the United Mine Workers of America. Yeah, the good old days. My mother says Barack Obama is the best president we’ve had in a long time. When I mentioned Kennedy, she said “much better than that.” I agree. Obama has done a magnificent job. I’d say GWB and Mitt were about equally unqualified, again, not by ideology, but because they are both so empty-headed, vapid, and juvenile. (I give Mitt five points over Bush for maturity). Clinton was better qualified, if morally lapsed. GHWB a bit more skilled, but just as opportunistic. Reagan? I suspect he already had Alzheimer’s the first time he was inaugurated — he lived in a dream world. That takes us back to Carter… yeah, he was incomparably better qualified than Mitt, and that is indeed a low bar.

I’d like to clarify something, as a Mormon. Mormons do indeed believe that America is a promised land, and that Christ will come to America as well as to Jerusalem. But we do NOT conflate the government of the United States with America. Mormons are deeply skeptical of government power, particularly federal power, it having been used on many occasions against our forebears. There’s a pretty strong Ron Paul contingent among the Mormons, and if it weren’t for the Mitt Romney affinity factor, Paul would have had a shot in Utah.

A Christian that believes Jerusalem is a “promised land” need not endorse all or any actions of the Israeli government. And a Mormon who believes America is a promised land need not endorse the actions of the American government.

To the extent that Mormons imbue the American founding with such great religious importance, the reason is this:

“It may seen counterintuitive, but Mormons’ early exposure to persecution at the hands of other Americans – aided, Mormons say, by the U.S. government – wound up strengthening their patriotic streak.

“In the face of attacks, Mormons clung to the U.S. Constitution and its unprecedented guarantee of religious freedom. They distinguished between the document and those charged with implementing it.

“Mormon scripture goes so far as to describe the U.S. Constitution as divinely inspired, establishing a unique environment in which Mormonism could emerge.”

I’ve never heard the bit about Mormons being in more in favor of open-borders as a logical consequence of their Native Americans = lost Israelites beliefs… but I guess it makes a weird sort of sense, if you grant the premise.

That said, I do wish someone in the press would straight-up ask Romney if he actually believes any Native Americans are descended from ancient Israelites. It’s about as absurd as the “Afro-centrist” claims that black Africans built the pyramids and invented higher mathematics, but since it’s his “religion”, no body wants to ask him about that on-the-record.

“Don’t Mormons believe, or at least are supposed to believe, that Jesus Christ is a God, and God the Father is another God? What about people becoming Gods?”Don’t all Christians believe in an eternal afterlife (at least for those who qualify)? One of the marks that separate gods from men is immortality. If Christians attain eternal life or immortality, doesn’t that mean they become like “God”? The idea that Mormons have that every Mormon will have a planet of his own is really beyond the pale. We all know that Heaven consists of one acre plots or condominiums overlooking the ocean.

As another Mormon, I agree with MC’s assessment. On the whole, Mormons association with America as the promised land is more about the freedoms and liberties that have been afforded to us as citizens rather than an aggressive foreign policy.

Afro-centrist claims are absurd, but it is entirely probable that some mathematicians with Greek names who lived in Egypt had dark skin. The ancient world was a lot more fluid than the ideologies invented since 1500 by the Portuguese, Dutch, British, and French would suggest. That doesn’t mean black people invented science, but it does mean that “white” people were not the exclusive creators of math, science, philosophy and literature. Really “white” people were northern barbarians. The ancient Greeks were dark enough they would have been refused service in most American restaurants circa 1940.

Once again, as a Mormon, I wold not say that as a church we subscribe to either of these beliefs. I for one would advocate a much less cozy relationship with Israel.

As far as immigration goes, I think you will find a wide variety of thought among Mormons. I know a few that want to kick everyone out and a few that advocate complete amnesty. Our beliefs about American Indians apply only to spiritual and religious policies. The church does not advocate open borders and certainly not as a matter of doctrine.

The idea that we as Mormons “get our own planet” is more of a media invention than a doctrine and belief of most mormons. We believe that we can eternally progress and become more like God. However the one planet sound byte that commonly appears sounds just as silly to most mormons as it would to non-mormons.

I thought the storyline was that the descendents of the Israelites came here but were subsequently killed off by the locals, barely managing to hide the tablet version of the Book of Mormon underground before their deaths. But I’ve never actually read the Book of Mormon.

First off, I must admit that I really don’t see a coming surge of threat to our religious liberties or economy if Obama is re-elected.

As far as foreign policy goes, regardless of what he has said, a President Mitt Romney would be constrained by hard reality once actually entering office. The United States is an incredible country, and I truly feel blessed to have been born a citizen. But this country’s far from perfect, our way isn’t the only way, and our power is limited. As well it should be. Our military is excellent, but its capabilities are limited, short of national a footing of total war – with mass conscription, a militarized economy, and full societal commitment due to actual risk of defeat on our own soil. (And this all assumes an enemy playing by more or less the same strategic rules.) The past decade should have taught us this humility: without total war footing, we can do much, but we can rarely dictate terms, and then only at great cost.

What’s more, the American populace is less on board with unnecessary military interventions than at any time since Vietnam. Any politician not tracking all of the above is not paying attention.

I didn’t mean to suggest that “white people were the exclusive inventors of math, science, etc.” You’re absolutely right that racial categories like “black” and “white” really didn’t exist in the ancient world. I was just using the outlandish claims of Afro-centrism as an analogy to the outlandish claims of the BoM… in fact, I think Afrocentrist claims about black people building the pyramids are somewhat more believeable than Mormon mythology, if only for the reason that we know with about as much certainty as it is possible to have that there actually were black people on the African continent 4,000 years ago, whereas it’s extremelyunlikely that there were any Israelites in the Americas in 600 B.C.